Acta Baltico‑Slavica, 42 Warszawa 2018 DOI: 10.11649/abs.2018.005 Darius Staliūnas Lithuanian Institute of History Vilnius
[email protected] Hybrid identities in the era of ethno-nationalism: Te case of the krajowcy in Lithuania In response to the suspension from his duties of the Catholic Bishop of Vilnius Edward von der Ropp, the Baltic German newspaper Rigasche Zeitung described this senior Catholic clergyman as follows: “ein weinig Pole, ein wenig Deutscher, ein wenig Litauer, aber stark katholisch” (Wronka, 1917, p. 113) (slightly Polish, slightly German, slightly Lithuanian, but most of all a Catholic). Tere are no doubts as to his Catholic identifcation and involvement. Te Bishop of Vilnius went to great eforts in trying to unite not just the Catholics in his diocese, but in all the lands of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) (Staliūnas, 1996, pp. 291–299), which is most likely what prompted the Riga newspaper to describe him as “slightly Lithuanian”. Ropp went so far as to establish a political party in 1906, which was dominated by Polish fgures, and there is basically no question that of all the cultures in this land, he identifed most closely with Polish culture. However, the Polish national democrats accused the bishop of not defending Polish interests strongly enough, whereas the Lithuanian intelligentsia considered Ropp a Polish nationalist. In the end, we should not be surprised at the fact that the newspaper published in the “capital” of the Baltic provinces made sure to remind its readers of Ropp’s German origins. In this case, it is not the individual’s own selfidentifcation that we encounter, but the interpretation given by the publicist, one that the bishop himself would hardly have Tis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 PL License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/pl/), which permits redistribution, commercial and non commercial, provided that the article is properly cited.